


all my pictures of you

by flightofthebluealiens



Series: beatles songfics [2]
Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Historically Accurate, M/M, Minor Character Death, john lives on in the pictures, to some degree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29553549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofthebluealiens/pseuds/flightofthebluealiens
Summary: John Lennon is shot and killed on December 8th, 1980. He wakes up in Elton John’s Woodside estate the next morning. The afterlife is not exactly what he was expecting.
Relationships: John Lennon & Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney
Series: beatles songfics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2016524
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	all my pictures of you

_I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you_  
_That I almost believe that they’re real_  
_I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you_  
_That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel_

The Cure, “Pictures of You”

\------

John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City on December 8, 1980.

He didn’t know exactly what he had been expecting, but there was no light at the end of the tunnel. There wasn’t even a tunnel. No floating above his own body, no shiny golden stairway. No angel came down to guide him into God’s waiting embrace.

One moment, he was in a hospital room with blood spattering everything in sight, with doctors digging into him; sharp objects and the far-off wails of his wife. The next moment, he was dead.

On December 9, 1980, John Lennon woke up in Elton John’s Woodside estate.

Well, it was rather unfair to say he woke up in Woodside because he didn’t quite _wake up._ John simply opened his eyes and he was there. When he tried to move his limbs, he couldn’t, but it wasn’t like he was paralyzed… it was more like they weren’t there at all.

It was rather off-putting.

He thought of Yoko and Sean and tried desperately to pull himself free, but to no avail. Sound echoed through his mind, the identical twins of Yoko’s screams and the ambulance siren. He went to shake his head but he could not even do that, and panic and rage began to set in.

_What did that bastard do to me?_ John pictured the pimply, fat kid who had asked for an autograph. How he had called out to John moments before the gun fired. He had heard it rather than felt it; the bullets had seemed to glide seamlessly into his body, like a hot knife through butter. He had collapsed. Stared at nothing, with his mind racing like a freight train. _Yoko, Sean, nearest hospital, Paul, stupid fat fuck, Sean, stupid fat fuck with the record how will Yoko manage Sean what about the Plastic what about the cats and Paul and…_

John could not remember much else after that point.

_If this is the afterlife, it’s complete and utter shite thus far._ Who would want to spend the afterlife at one of Elton’s many mansions?

Perhaps a drag queen. There were plenty of fucking shoes.

When John looked around, he realized what the problem was: he appeared to be trapped inside the wall, with only his face poking out. Of course, _he_ would be the one who got stuck in a wall as he got beamed up to heaven. It was probably God’s revenge for that comment back in ‘66.

The setting was familiar. It was the coziest of Elton’s three living rooms, the one with all the granny couches (John often thought Elton’s decor was influenced too heavily by his nan) and the blue antique lamps. For the afterlife, it was the best of the possible living rooms; at least he wasn’t in the one with the remote-control disco ball.

He could hear a song playing. It was one of his, actually, off of the first Plastic Ono Band record… John hadn’t known that Elton had bought the album. _Did_ Elton _buy it though, if this is the afterlife?_ John could not spy the record player from his limited vantage point.

Then Elton came into the room. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, and there was a glass of whiskey hanging out of his hand, except that it was filled nearly to the top and it was sloshing onto the rug. The bottle itself was clutched in Elton’s other hand, the lid off. John watched as Elton lifted the bottle to his lips and gulped down nearly a third of it. If John had been able to move his face, he would have grimaced.

Elton sighed and set the bottle down on the coffee table a little harder than was necessary. The glass made a satisfying _clunk_ sound against the wood. He collapsed onto the extra-wide couch behind it and looked straight into John’s eyes.

“Elton! Get off your arse and help me out here,” John said. Or… or _tried_ to say. The words caught in his throat like a fishbone and the only sound that escaped him was a whisper-like choke. “Elt- Elton, I don’t know--” John choked. “I’m stuck--”

There was no response. Elton stared at him for a moment longer, hands twitching so that the whiskey in his glass spilled on the couch cushions. And then Elton leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and his face in his free hand. His shoulders began to shake.

_Right,_ John thought. _I’m dead. He’s probably not quite over it yet._

Elton was openly sobbing. All John could think about was his ‘lost weekend,’ so much of it spent with the man, and yet he had never seen his friend cry like this.

He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t look away. His eyelids were pasted open so that he had to watch as Elton broke down; his friend’s shoulders shook and tears rolled down his cheeks, his face going blotchy and red as he pawed at the wet spots. 

_This is an invasion of privacy,_ John thought, desperately trying to turn away. _I have to get out of here, go somewhere else. Another room or something._ In his mind, John saw Elton’s office… the eggshell-colored carpet and the bright red walls, the fancy mahogany bookshelves with all the records stuffed on them. It was the next room over if John remembered correctly; right through that door…

And John did not close his eyes, but it changed. It was more like a power outage than anything, the darkness overtaking the room and shifting around him, under him, behind him. He could do nothing but watch as his surroundings shifted.

Sure enough, he was in the next room over. He was right next to the record player, and he could see his LP turning on it. The room looked just like John remembered it, with its plush carpets and even plusher furniture. The only difference was the mirror up against the opposite wall, completely covering the wallpaper…

And then John caught a look at himself.

The _himself_ on the cover of the album, which he was peering at _from the cover of the album._ Making direct-fucking-eye-contact. 

He was trapped in the photographs.

If he could’ve fainted, he would’ve. Instead he just sort of stared a bit less hard.

\------

John had only one thought on his mind: how to get to his family.

He hadn’t tried quite yet. John had spent the past week leaping back and forth between photographs of him in Elton’s house, trying to figure out the extent of his new abilities, as well as avoiding Elton because he couldn’t stand to see the man cry. This was oddly voyeuristic and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see his wife and his son cry over his death. It was somehow a private moment, even though he probably would’ve been crying alongside them had one of the people he loved died.

Weeks passed, then a month, and John was losing track of time. Without a body, he seemed not to comprehend time at all; he measured his days by the rise of the sun outside Woodside’s bay windows and the eventual darkness that crept in. A day seemed incredibly short when there were no people to speak to, no food to eat. Nothing to see or hear unless Elton wandered into one of the rooms, usually with coke rimmed around his nostrils like salt on a margarita glass.

John’s hands longed for a guitar. He longed for Yoko and Sean more, dreamed of pressing his nose into Sean’s scalp and smelling that little-boy smell; so specific to his son and he missed it. There were so many things that were terrible about being dead, but the worst part was the little things that he was missing. Like time and guitars and his son.

He hadn’t tried to leave Woodside yet. If he did, he feared he might get stuck somewhere, or he might die a second time. Never make it overseas to the Dakota.

It was irrational, but John was afraid of drowning. He had swam like a fish when he had inhabited a body. He didn’t think photo frames would float so easily.

But somehow, he pictures the white walls and white carpets without intention, and then he’s there, or as close as he can get.

_It’s been a month,_ he thought, incredulous at what he was seeing. Incredulous at the idea that there was a humongous portrait of him hung up in Central Park. But fact was stranger than fiction, right? He had been shot to death by a superfan who read _Catcher in the Rye_ on his doorstep until the police came. He had woken up in his mate’s mansion in London, more than three thousand miles away from his home.

Central Park had giant posters hung up in the spot where he used to run away and have a smoke when Yoko arrived at the apartment in a foul mood. 

He didn’t know what to say, and it wasn’t like he could say anything in the first place.

He wanted to go back home. But home was gone; Yoko and Sean had left the place they had once been a family. The Americans and English and everybody else in the stupid bloody world had kicked him when he was down, and yet they hung banners of his face up to mourn him. They had treated his wife like she was no better than dog shit on their shoes, had acted like his ‘house-husbandry’ was deserving of contempt, that his life beyond the Beatles was something to be ignored until he came to his senses.

John resented them, and they had known it. He had made no secret of it, especially after ‘66. Scoffed in the face of the American press and carefully tiptoed around an apology. Punished them by leaving the stage, but they had punished him right back, refusing to let him leave the spotlight.

And they had hung a banner of his face in Central Park like it was another advertisement for a Beatles concert. _Come and see the show, come and see the pasty British lads prance about on stage and shake their hair._ Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they adorable?

Well, none of them would ever see that again. That was certain now. He was gone. 

And that was what they fucking got. 

That was what _he_ got.

John retreated to Woodside and watched Elton snort enough cocaine to kill a horse, wail along to some Joni Mitchell records, and put his fist through a vase.

He felt rather like a stage mother, living vicariously through her child.

\------

Ringo’s house had one picture of John, framed and sitting on a dresser in an oversized guest bedroom which nobody ever went into. John sat in there for one full cycle of the sun-- he was reluctant to say _days_ because they didn’t _feel_ like days, not the way they used to, and it was just wrong to refer to them as such --and not even a housekeeper came in.

It was better than George, who had no pictures of him. Just the covers of the old Beatles albums, tucked away in a box on a shelf in his garage, presumably; John couldn’t see to tell.

(He was not going to Paul’s.)

John rotated between the photo of him Yoko kept in her purse, wishing desperately to feel close to his wife-- his _widow_ \--and the photos of him in Elton’s house. He felt comfortable there, despite having truly stepped foot inside only once or twice before. It was odd that he had touched his feet to the floor for a shorter period of time than he had spent in the photographs.

A lot of music studios seemed to have his picture there now. Elvis Costello, the Stones, even Dylan. And he had thought Dylan was thoroughly in George’s pocket.

(He wanted to see Paul, he did. But he didn’t know what he would find.)

Julian didn’t seem to be taking it well. There was a picture of him and Julian when he was young, leaning up against that Rolls-Royce of his, just after he had shaved the Sgt. Pepper mustache off. Julian was putting his hand on his hip. Just like da.

John had popped in to check on his elder son, and as if Julian had sensed his presence, he had reached over to the bedside table and turned the picture frame facedown.

He never saw Cynthia. He didn’t want to anyway.

(Would it be worse if he was still in mourning or if he had already moved on? Had he even been upset in the first place, or had a cold, calculating Paul thought _one more rival down?_ )

John couldn’t do this anymore. He had to go and see Paul. It wasn’t like it was the end of the world, anyway; he would never have to go back if he didn’t want to. He controlled his life now.

His death.

So John prepared for the worst, which was what he called _stalling._ He went back to check on Ringo and nobody was in the room, although the bed was unmade. A positive sign. He went to work with Yoko, hid in the wallet-sized photo of him and Sean when he was a baby. It felt empty without Sean; he felt empty without Yoko.

He missed her and Sean as if he had lost one of his teeth. John kept running his tongue over the strange, gaping, and bloody hole where it had once been but found nothing but empty space.

John also missed silly, little things. He watched Elton devour a stack of pancakes after a particularly rough high and wished he could have some. He heard his Plastic Ono Band record playing again and thought of his record player. Probably in storage or a museum somewhere.

His resolve finally broke. He went to Paul.

To John’s surprise, there was a photo of him on the desk Paul worked at. The office was cozy, with carpeted floors and yellow-painted walls and stacks of sheet music everywhere. That fucking Hofner bass hung on the wall by the window and taunted him. Yet another Beatles relic.

A framed photo of Linda and Paul at their wedding hung on the wall beside it.

There was nothing for him here. Not with Paul gone, and probably not with Paul here. John was just about to leave when the man himself entered.

How long had it been now? Almost a year, by his best guess. He looked older than when John last saw him, graying around the temples and wrinkling around the eyes and mouth. John was sure that Paul wouldn’t let that progress long.

But hell, Paul was damn near forty now, if not already-- he could be forgiven a little roughness around the edges. Or, he could be if he was George or John or Ringo. Paul was the ‘cute Beatle,’ the one all the girls liked, at least when it came to looks… sure, the rest of them were well-loved, got their fair share of fondness and beyond, but Paul was always the one batting his eyelashes…

Look at him, reminiscing on the old days.

Paul studied one of the loose sheets of paper on his desk, brow furrowed-- well, _that’s_ certainly not helping with your wrinkles, old man --and leg shaking incessantly. He drummed his fingers on the desk. John had always made vicious fun of Paul for that, how he couldn’t even imagine a tune without moving in response.

He tended to make vicious fun of people for things he found endearing.

Minutes passed, and John’s desire to turn and run faded. It had always been easier to be around Paul when he wasn’t aware of your presence. When he wasn’t turning his glowing smile and fluttering eyelashes and flattery on _you._

When John could stand in the corner of a room and watch Paul laugh with George and Ringo or Neil and Mal, it was easier than talking to him himself. It was easier. It was better.

This was like that. This was the opposite of whatever watching Elton take drugs and shout at the walls and eat entire containers of ice cream was-- that felt ugly, while this felt comforting. More adjacent to watching Sean muck about with his toy trucks on the carpet of whatever new place Yoko and Sean were living in. Easier and better.

Then Paul turned his eyes on the picture of John.

It wasn’t the way he had looked at John when they had last met. Like he had thought something was going to break if he breathed too hard, or that John was going to wallop him upside the head if he mentioned Linda or the Beatles.

It was the way he had studied that sheet music just before; looking for meaning, searching for a rhythm he had written down months before and forgotten.

John held his stare. It wasn’t as though Paul knew he was there, after all. (And there was so much _all,_ wasn’t there? Liverpool and Hamburg and New York City, Beatles-Beatles- _Beatles_ until something had to give…)

Paul shook his head as if to clear it and looked back down at his music. “I still can’t believe you’re really gone.”

The breath caught in John’s throat. 

_Do I have a throat still?_ His metaphorical throat, then.

He waited with bated metaphorical breath for Paul to say something more, but he didn’t. Simply went back to staring at his papers, humming out melodies, and drumming his fingers.

Odd. John wondered if this would be a frequent occurrence.

\------

Weeks and months passed. John watched his old friend pick up sheet music and scatter it all over the floor again, pluck out a million different lines on the same old guitar, listen to new records John would never be alive to hear. Music hadn’t lost any of its qualities in the afterlife; John could still hear all the intricacies of the instrumentals and vocals, could still feel the swell of different emotions when different pieces played.

There was never music playing in Yoko and Sean’s new house. Sean was in primary school and he was rarely there to hear it, and Yoko was always out working, advocating, protesting. Making art and music, just as she always had, but none of it seemed to be present in their home.

John had missed them both terribly when he had first died, but it was beginning to soften; he was less angry and bitter and felt more of a dull ache that sharpened when he saw Sean taking his first guitar lessons on an old acoustic or Yoko coming in through the front door and ceremoniously sweeping off her hat, scooping Sean up into her arms.

He was a coward for it, but he tried to stay away from these little moments. He wished that he could be part of them, and he knew that if he stayed he would spend the rest of this godforsaken afterlife aching and wishing and longing. So he went to Paul instead.

One evening, after watching Yoko put Sean to bed, he went back to Paul’s office to find him already there. Poring over some thick packet of papers.

“You’ve only just released an album,” a low, soft voice said. “Why do you need to release another one so soon?”

Linda. Of course. Well, it figured that he would run into her sooner than later, so why not? John searched the room for her from his limited vantage point and noticed her kneeling on the carpet, sorting through a pile of scribbled-on notebook paper. Lyrics of some sort, he was sure.

“You know why,” Paul responded, obviously distracted by the task at hand.

Linda frowned, pressing her lips together and standing up. She set the stack of recollected papers on the side of Paul’s desk and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Paul?”

Paul finally glanced up, meeting her eyes and matching the frown there. He sighed. “I’m sorry, luv. It’s just…” _...was it John’s imagination, or did he glance toward the picture on his desk?..._ “It’s been a long year. Lots to think on, lots to write an album on.”

Linda’s hand didn’t move.

His gaze dropped to the desktop.

“Paul,” she said, more insistently, “I understand what you’re going through. It can’t be easy, losing him like this. Somebody you’ve known since you were a kid.”

He didn’t respond. John may have imagined it, but he thought he saw Paul’s hands tighten where they gripped the edge of the desk. Tension at the approaching discussion of feelings-- hadn’t John himself experienced that a thousand times over?

“All I’m saying is that I’m here if you want to talk about it. And I’m here if you don’t.”

Paul, for a fleeting moment, looked like he might be considering it.

Then, with a falsely-cheerful voice: “Thank you, Lin. I appreciate that.”

Words that don’t mean anything; avoid the implications of the statement and you can avoid the follow-up questions and the throwing things and the embarrassing tears. It’s a classic Liverpudlian tactic, at least when you’re a man of their generation.

Linda sighed and pressed her lips to Paul’s forehead, and he leaned into the touch for just a moment before she walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Paul turned his gaze on the photograph of John again. He paused for a moment, opened his mouth and shut it again, licked his lips. Hesitating.

What else could he do? John waited.

“Why’d you have to go and die?” asked Paul. “It makes things so much more complicated.”

_Hmm. Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting._

Paul put his face in his hands. Ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. “One minute I’m talkin’ to you on the phone about silly things, bread and those god awful Sex Pistols, and now you’ve been shot.”

John would have frowned if he could. That wasn’t exactly fair to him, now was it? He hadn’t _asked_ for some pimply psycho to end his life prematurely.

Paul paused for a long moment, then sat back in his chair and gazed at the picture of John once again. “I’m talkin’ to a bloody picture. Look what you’ve got me doin’.” He laughed, but it sounded hollow, like his cheerful words to Linda.

He stood up, sighing. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but caught himself, shutting his mouth once again and walking determinedly out of the room. The door shut behind him and John was left alone, surrounded by Beatles relics and sheet music for a million songs Paul would never finish.

\------

Paul took to talking to the picture whenever he was in the office. It was strange, this one-sided conversation, considering John couldn’t respond except in thought and yet Paul seemed to know exactly what he was going to say. He figured that was what happened when you knew somebody for more than half your life.

As far as John could figure, it had been years since his death now. Time was slipping through his fingers and he couldn’t seem to hold on to it, no matter how hard he tried to grab at it. Days passed, just sitting in Paul or Sean’s office-- the two places he rotated between now, because looking at his old friends’ spare rooms and Elton’s wreck of a drug den only served to bring him down --and he never seemed to notice that the sun had risen and set four times until he saw the date on Paul’s calendar.

Sean’s _office._ He was an adult, a full-grown man, a musician just like his da. Sometimes it made John want to cry and sometimes he wished he could be at his concerts, waving a lighter.

He rarely got a glimpse of Yoko. John was aware of her absence like a war veteran is aware of a missing limb, but he couldn’t blame her for keeping the photo of him tucked away. He would’ve done the same… and by this point, he hoped she had moved on.

According to Paul’s calendar, it was April 24th, 1998.

Almost eighteen years since he had died.

Paul hadn’t been in his office for weeks, so when he entered the room, John was elated-- finally, some ‘interaction’ again --until he saw the look on Paul’s face.

His old friend sat down at his desk, folded his hands over his stomach, and stared blankly at the wall. He tilted his head from side to side as though trying to crack his neck.

A few long moments passed.

“She’s dead,” Paul finally said. It sounded like an admission, like a secret he had been trying to keep. “Linda died a week ago.”

He didn’t cry; his face remained as blank as it always had when confronted with death. Eppy’s death, particularly, stuck out in John’s mind-- the look of complete and utter numbness.

But John knew all about that.

“First me mum, now me wife,” Paul said, chewing on his lower lip. “Breast cancer, the both of them. Wonder how I got so lucky.” He paused again. “But, y’know, I knew it was comin’. At least I got to say goodbye.”

He turned his gaze on John’s picture and John suddenly felt too small for it, like an ant cowering before a giant. How had Paul gotten so lucky, he wondered, as to suffer so many losses throughout his life?

_Seems tragedy waits for you around every corner,_ he thought, imagining himself sitting in the corner, with a guitar and something witty to say, as always. There to distract and not comfort. _You ought to take one of them blind men’s sticks and start jabbing before you make the turn._

Paul’s mouth slanted up on one side as though he had heard the joke himself. It was a jaded smile, though; one that didn’t fit right on his pretty face. Full of exhaustion and misery. Fed-up.

“However bad losin’ you was, this is just as bad,” he tells John quietly, and turns away.

He sits in the office for the rest of the day, weeping at intervals and staring between the wall and the picture of John at other times. By a week later, there is a picture of Linda beside one of John… but he never can tell if she’s trapped in there, same as him.

\------

George died three years later. Cancer, yet again.

Paul went to the funeral and came back to the office and spent hours sitting on the floor, face buried in his hands. John spent hours yearning to be the comforting presence he never could when he was alive.

He traveled to as many copies of _Rubber Soul_ and _With The Beatles_ and terrible promotional posters as he could, but found George nowhere.

So it _was_ his own personal purgatory. Revenge for ‘bigger than Jesus.’ He wished he could go back in time to 1966 and knock those stupid bloody sunglasses off his face.

\------

Paul remarried and divorced and remarried again and each wife was younger than the last. Each wife spent less time in the office than the last. So it simply belonged to John and Paul, and the latter began to talk more and more; he played guitar parts and basslines and fiddled around on the piano and asked John what he thought. Smiled to himself as though he already knew.

“You would probably think that’s a load of lovely crap,” Paul would say, and rework the piece.

It _was_ crap, and not particularly lovely.

John listened to him prattle on about calls from Jimmy Page and Dylan and a million other songwriters and musicians, hoping to get him to tour with them, hoping to get him to compose for yet another movie soundtrack… and yet while John would probably tire of that quickly, retreat back into himself and his ‘househusbandry,’ Paul seemed to revel in it. 

He never lost energy, never seemed to bother much. Wrote albums like it was nothing. Didn’t seem to mind if they didn’t chart.

It was a far cry from what John’s reaction would have been to a flop of an album, but then again, the charts had been different when he was alive. Now rock was dead and had been replaced by ‘hip-hop’ and ‘alternative pop,’ and the music he had played as a twenty-something was filed under ‘classic rock.’ 

John felt old and he was technically a ghost.

Years flowed by unevenly; sometimes he felt the days and weeks stretched on forever and sometimes he could go from April 2023 to April 2024 without realizing they were Aprils in two different years. 

He watched Sean have children with his partner-- she seemed like a lovely woman, John would have liked to meet her --and reconnect with his older brother. 

(He did try, with Julian. Nobody could say John hadn’t done his best. He had been too young, and everybody knew that. Even Cynthia knew that. Nobody could say he hadn’t _tried._ )

He watched Yoko die.

And waited, with bated breath, for her to come to him. For her to appear in a portrait alongside him and greet him once again, her old lover, her husband and her friend. He lurked in every picture of the two of them he could find and hoped desperately; he wished he had fingers to cross for luck.

And nothing.

She was lost to him, just as Linda was lost to Paul, just as George and John Entwistle and Lonnie Donegan and all those other guys were lost to the world. Everybody dies, and on top of that, everybody is dead to him, even though he’d been dead for more than forty fucking years.

He couldn’t even see his wife again.

So, when Paul’s health began to decline years after that, he prayed. He prayed for the first time in his life-- _afterlife_ \--that his best friend, his onetime love, would not be taken from him too.

\------

Sir James Paul McCartney died on April 17th, 2032, exactly thirty-four years after the death of his first wife, Linda. He was eighty-nine years old.

He didn’t so much ascend into the afterlife as tumble vaguely into it, being that the journey out of his body was less like a comfortable rising from his flesh and more like being shoved into a dryer running on high; he was tossed about like a wet blanket for a bit and then landed firmly in wherever-the-hell-this-was.

When he stood up and planted both feet on the ground, he wondered for a moment if he had perhaps taken a wrong turn and ended up in El Dorado, because everything appeared to be some shade of gold.

The sky, the grass, the cement pathways, even the trees… he appeared to be in a golden Central Park.

_Oh, if the Christians only knew,_ he thought and began his march down one of the intersecting pathways.

With the ground seeming to morph under his feet, tinted green and blue and gray, rippling like liquid gold, it was a rather disconcerting experience. He hoped that nobody slipped something in his hospital water… if he was still alive and just on a bad trip…

That train of thought stopped abruptly when he saw John, standing in the center of the pathway facing him, looking as bewildered as he felt.

“Oh,” he said softly.

John stared at him, as though unable to believe he was truly there.

“I’ve missed you,” Paul admitted, staring back. John didn’t look the way he had when he died, all sharp angles and shaggy hair. Not that Paul had even seen him-- it had been years since they had met in person. Photographs seen in newspapers, mostly.

Paul was staring at a version of John he could only just remember; the young man he had played infinite shows with in the early Sixties. He was wearing the suit and everything.

“I--” John started to speak, then suddenly grabbed hold of the base of his throat, eyes wide.

“John?” Paul hurried forward, grabbing hold of John’s arms. “What’s wrong?”

He seemed to flinch away from the touch and Paul withdrew, only for John to reach out and grab hold of his forearms. His hands were solid and strong. There was no way this was an accidental trip…

“I can talk,” John said dumbly. “Why do you look like a ted?”

“What d’you mean, you can talk?” Paul looked down at himself, attempting to confirm the teddy boy comment, but found nothing to suggest that; he looked just as old and frail as he had when he died.

John ignored his question. “You look just like you did when we were in Hamburg. But that’s impossible, ‘cos you were just an old man, I _saw_ you--”

“You saw me?”

He paused, and slowly reached up, pressing his fingertips against the corner of Paul’s eye where his crow’s feet once were. “You’re so young.”

“What do you mean, you saw me?” Paul asked insistently.

John refused to snap out of it. “I was in the pictures. Long story.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was in the pictures, traveled between them at will, spent a lot of time in your office listenin’ to you play. Then you went to the hospital. But there were no pictures of me at the hospital, so I couldn’t be sure you’d died until now. Took awhile for you to kick the bucket, mate. Anyway, you’re old, so I dunno why you look like you’re seventeen.” John huffed. “All caught up?”

Paul stared blankly at him. “I’m _sorry_?” he repeated.

A small smile spread across John’s face. His smirky sort of smile that the cameras never seemed to get right, and Paul felt a painful twinge of affection and relief and _oh God, he’s standing right in front of me and it’s been decades and I have no idea what to say to him--_

“Still as slow on the uptake as ever, I see.”

“You’re such an arse,” Paul said breathlessly and grabbed hold of his old friend in a tight hug that nearly lifted John off the ground, but John hugged him back. Despite complaints of ‘cracked ribs,’ when he put John back on the ground, he didn’t let go of Paul.

And as they continued down the pathway, hand-in-hand, giggling over decades-old inside jokes, unabashedly drinking in the other’s appearance, talking and talking…

“Oh, and what the fuck does Elton think he’s doing?”

“With the Broadway production or the brand of fruit smoothies?”

…well, all seemed to be right with the world again.

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO!! It's been a while, but I'm excited to be working on some Beatles fic again... I've been tinkering with the concept of this one for a few months and might consider expanding upon it in a later sequel or extension. As always, comments are extremely welcome, I really appreciate knowing what y'all think!
> 
> Thanks, as always, to my lovely beta mossintheconcrete, and thank _you,_ dear reader.


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